The Devil in History

by Vladimir Tismaneanu

  100. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 595.

  101. Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1943-1949, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 65.

  102. For discussions about “Soviet subjectivity,” see Igal Halfin, “Intimacy in an Ideological Key” and Jochen Hellbeck, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” in Language and Revolution, ed. Igor Halfin, pp. 114-35. See also Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 71-96; and Igal Halfin, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 34-40. For a critique of this approach, see Aleksandr Ėtkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 171-86.

  103. Quoted in David Priestland, Stalinism and The Politics of Mobilization, p. 293.

  104. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, p. 94.

  105. For this point, see Richard Overy, The Dictators, p. 633.

  106. Igal Halfin, “Introduction,” p. 14.

  107. Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), p. 116.

  108. Dan Diner, Cataclysms, pp. 192-93. A side comment to this discussion could be a reminder that in a Communist system the meaning and significance of forced labor should be explained starting from Marxian terminology. According to Marx, labor was “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities which a human being exercises whenever he produces.” Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton), p. 309. Therefore, forced labor in the gulag represented a method of exhausting individuals, of absolute takeover of the self. The zeks were spent human beings. This is maybe one of the crucial lessons offered by authors such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nadejda Mandelstam, and Varlam Shalamov. For the liminal nature of gulag experience, what German philosopher Karl Jaspers defined as Grenzsituationen (limit-situations), and the impossibility of communicating it, see the chapters “Return” and “Memory,” in Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 535-656.

  109. After 1945, the gulag increasingly merged with the civilian economy, which was being transformed into “a vast industrial empire” (in the words of Figes). It also became more and more unmanageable, and the consequences of “the culture of the champs” deepened its “contamination” potential. Upon Stalin's death, but also before it, the gulag was seriously shaken by large uprisings such as that of Norilsk. For a short history of the latter, see Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 529-34.

  110. Overy, The Dictators, p. 643.

  111. Werth, “Stalin's System during the 1930s,” in Stalinism and Nazism, ed. Henri Rousso, pp. 74-75. In this contribution Werth identifies four interrelated types of violence in Stalin: “The first arose out of the paranoia of a dictator constructing his own cult against ‘comrades in arms'; … terror directed at Party or economic cadres; … virtual criminalization of the daily behavior or ‘ordinary' citizens; … violence exercised against a number of non-Russian ethic groups.” This rule of arbitrariness for the sake of the etatization of Utopia is best summarized by Dan Diner in the following statement: “In the heyday of Stalinism, despotism and fear were the elixir of rule.” Diner, Cataclysms, p. 191.

  112. Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality” New York Review of Books 56, no. 12, July 16, 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875.

  113. Ibid.

  114. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 406.

  115. Peter Fritzsche, “On Being the Subjects of History: Nazis as Twentieth-Century Revolutionaries,” in Language and Revolution, ed. Igal Halfin, p. 151.

  116. Norman Naimark, “Totalitarian States and the History of Genocide,” Telos 136, (Fall 2006): 14. In his piece, Naimark underlines the fact that the author of the concept, Raphael Lemkin, “was convinced that the international community should mount a legal initiative against states that attacked peoples, religious groups, racial minorities, and outlier political groups” (p. 15). Moreover, “all of the early drafts of the Genocide Convention, including the initial U.N. Secretariat draft of May 1947, included political groups in their definition. The Soviets, Poles, and even some non-communist members of the committees and drafting commissions objected” (p. 17).

  117. Dan Diner, Cataclysms, p. 90.

  118. Souvarine (sometimes spelled Suvarin), quoted in The Black Book, 296.

  119. See his profound book Le malheur du siècle: Sur le communisme, le nazisme et l'unicité de la Shoah (Paris: Fayard, 1998).

  120. Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 287.

  121. I am paraphrasing Bartov. He gives a commendable portrait of the dogmatic mind: “One had to lie blatantly and consistently to oneself and one's society to make Bolshevism palatable.” Ibid., p. 286.

  122. Dan Diner, “Remembrance and Knowledge: Nationalism and Stalinism in Comparative Discourse,” in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 86-87.

  123. For an excellent discussion on the differences between the gulag and the Holocaust and the process by which the latter's memory has been sacralized, see Gabriel Motzkin, “The Memory of Crime and the Formation of Identity,” in The Lesser Evil, ed. Dubiel and Motzkin.

  124. Helmut Dubiel, “The Remembrance of the Holocaust as a Catalyst for a Transnational Ethnic?” in “Taboo, Trauma, Holocaust,” special issue, New German Critique 90 (Autumn 2003): 59-70.

  125. See Krzystof Pomian, “Communisme et nazisme: Les tragédies du siecle,” L'Histoire (July-August 1998): 100-105. For a similar view, see Michael Scammel's review of The Black Book. In his review, Scammell notices that, in the American edition, some chapters lack bibliographies. In fact, at least in the case of the chapter dealing with Central and South-East Europe, authored by Karel Bartosek, the French edition included a list of further readings that was strangely deleted from the American translation. Indeed, one of my own books published in Romanian in 1996 was mentioned in Bartosek's bibliography (Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej, Bucharest, 1995).

  126. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). He defines comparative trivialization thus: “At its heart lies the device of acknowledging Nazi atrocities but, as it were, ‘humanizing' them by pointing, indignantly, at crimes committed by others—crimes presumably as vicious as those perpetrated in the Third Reich … its historical function is to cover the special horror of German barbarity between 1933 and 1945, and to divert attention from studying barbarity in its own—that is to say, its German context” (pp. xi-xiv).

  127. Quoted by Stéphane Courtois in his conclusion to The Black Book, p. 751.

  128. I don't share philosopher Avishai Margalit's view that the ideological premises of Communism, universalistic and humanist at least in the Marxism texts, would make the application of the radical evil concept inaccurate. But Margalit's analysis of the differences between opportunistic and principled compromises remains illuminatingly useful. See his book On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  129. Alain Besançon, “Mémoire et oubli du communisme,” Commentaire, no. 80 (Winter 1997-98): 789-93. The essay was translated as “Forgotten Communism” in the American journal Commentary 105, no. 1 (January 1998): 24-27.

  130. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 295.

  131. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 2-3.

  132. Martin Malia, “Foreword,” in The Black Book, ed. Stéphane Courtois, p. xx.

  133. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship—Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000
), pp. 36-38.

  134. Lawrence Olivier, Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 33, no. 2 (June 2000): p. 399.

  135. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Obituary or Autopsy?” p. 319.

  136. Igal Halfin lists the categories defined by Chapter 13 of the Declaration: “(1) The so-called former people (byvshie liudi)—primarily religious functionaries and employees of the tsarist police and military; (2) class aliens—landowners, individuals who lived off unearned income, exploiters, private trades; (3) administrative exiles and individuals who had their rights suspended by a court; (4) individuals economically dependent on the previously listed; and (5) the mentally ill.” It is not difficult to see how these categories could balloon to the dimensions of an out-out war against society, as discussed above. See Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). Of course, Suny could argue that this document falls in line with the principle that “some omelets that are worth broken eggs, but, as anyone making breakfast knows, first one should make sure that all the ingredients are available and remember that eggs must be broken delicately, not smashed so that yokes, whites, and shells all get cooked together” (“Obituary,” p. 318).

  137. Tony Judt, “The Longest Road to Hell,” p. A27.

  138. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Opinions,” p. 295.

  139. Emilio Gentile and Robert Mallett “The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, no. 1 (2000): p. 52.

  140. In my view, the best analysis of the intellectual origins and transmogrifications of Communism and Fascism remains Jacob L. Talmon, Myth of the Nation and Vision of the Revolution: Ideological Polarizations in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Transaction, 1991), with a new introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz (originally published by the University of California Press in 1981).

  141. Evans, The Coming, p. 324.

  142. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, pp. 220 and 240.

  143. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 65.

  144. The Black Book, p. 755.

  145. See Weber, “Revolution?” p. 43.

  2. DIABOLICAL PEDAGOGY AND THE (IL)LOGIC OF STALINISM

  1. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 211-63.

  2. One could argue, however, that the activities of the People's Court in Nazi Germany in the context of the obvious defeat in the war came very close to Soviet show trials. This institution functioned similarly to Stalin's courts during the Great Terror when trying the group led by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, which tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 in a failed attempt commonly known as Operation Valkyrie. See Hans Mommsen, Germans against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance under the Third Reich (London: Tauris, 2009).

  3. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 400.

  4. For one of the most thoughtful and still valid interpretations of the dynamics of the Soviet bloc, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

  5. For a detailed discussion, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

  6. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 299.

  7. G. R. Urban, ed., Stalinism—Its Impact on Russia and the World (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1982), pp. 103-4.

  8. John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 21-95.

  9. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 527.

  10. For “Lenin's Testament” (his letters to the Party Congress), see Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000), pp. 464-80.

  11. Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 81.

  12. Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, pp. 556-60.

  13. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York and Wildwood House: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 378.

  14. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind, pp. 83-85.

  15. Cohen, Bukharin, pp. 370-71.

  16. In a conversation with Lev Kamenev (July 11, 1928) later published abroad by the Trotskyites, Bukharin declared, “Stalin knows only vengeance. We must remember his theory of sweet revenge.” According to Tucker, “This was a reference to something that Stalin had said one summer night in 1923 to Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky: ‘To choose one's victim, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed …. There is nothing sweeter in the world'” Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind, p. 57.

  17. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Suicides within the Top Communist Nomenklatura: The Case of Mirel Costea,” Studies and Materials of Contemporary History, Academia Română, Institutul de Istorie “Nicolae Iorga,” n.s., vols. 910, pp. 138-153 [in Romanian with an English summary]. Once I obtained the above-mentioned documents, I published on my personal blog a short article about Costea's tragedy. Soon thereafter I was approached by one of his daughters, Dana Silvan, who lives in Israel. She wrote me that neither she nor her sister (now living in the United States) had any idea that their father had left that last message to them. Her interpretation is that, in emphasizing his boundless loyalty to the party, Costea was in fact trying to protect his wife and his daughters. For the meaning of the Pătrășcanu affair, see my book Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  18. Ethan Pollock, “Stalin as the Coryphaeus of Science,” in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 272. He adds prior to the above quote: “Instead of revealing ulterior motives behind Stalin's actions, top secret documents are saturated with the same Marxist-Leninist language, categories, and frames for understanding the world that appeared in the public discourse.” In Times Literary Supplement (January 28, 2000), Geoffrey Hosking made a similar remark in reference to the all-pervasiveness of Marxist-Leninist dogma: “Even when writing to each other in private they used the same language and articulated the same thoughts as in their public utterances.”

  19. Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 225-37; Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 2 (June 1998): 384-425; and “The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists,” Russian Review 61 (January 2002): 35-51.

  20. According to Stalin, unconditional support for and solidarity with the USSR, the homeland of socialism, was the touchstone of proletarian internationalism. This theory was used to justify the persecution and eventual elimination of all those Communists and other left-wingers who expressed the slightest reservation regarding the Soviet general line as codified by the leader and his associates. For the repression with the Third International apparatus in the USSR, see William J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2001).

  21. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 274.

  22. For social engineering utopias in the twentieth century, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., and London
: Yale University Press, 1998).

  23. Karen Dawisha, “Communism as a Lived System of Ideas in Contemporary Russia,” East European Politics and Societies 19, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 463-93.

  24. The initial formulation along these lines came from Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1951). Kenneth Jowitt added both conceptual and comparative flesh to this idea in his various articles and books throughout the years, first in his published PhD thesis, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 1944-1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Of course, for the Soviet Union, Stephen Kotkin and later Amir Weiner, with his Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), are maybe the most significant advocates of this idea.

  25. I am paraphrasing here Mary Fulbrook's theory of the “octopus” state (in counterdistinction to the pyramidal conceptualization of the Soviet-type regimes). See Mary Fulbrook, “Reckoning with the Past: Heroes, Victims, and Villains in the History of the German Democratic Republic,” in Rewriting the German Past—History and Identity in the New Germany, ed. Reinhard Alter and Peter Monteath (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997), pp. 175-96; Mary Fulbrook, The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2005).

  26. Quoted in François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 541.

  27. E. A. Rees, “The Sovietization of Eastern Europe,” in The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period, ed. Balázs Apor, Péter Apor, and E. A. Rees (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2008), p. 13.

  28. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 1-12.